How Much Demand Will There Be for Circumventing New York Times Paywall?

A Forbes.com article by Jeff Bercovici discusses the New York Times‘s plan to shut down a rogue Twitter feed called FreeNYTimes, which is meant to circumvent the Times‘s upcoming metered model (some people call it a paywall). As Bercovici writes:

It’s clever, but it’s not kosher. “We have asked Twitter to disable this feed as it is in violation of our trademark,” says a Times spokeswoman. She adds that the paper has been monitoring and has already blown the whistle on other violations. … I also asked her about NYTClean, a bookmark that defeats the paywall with the aid of four lines of code. The response: “As we have said previously, as with any paid product, we expect that there will be some percentage of people who will find ways around our digital subscriptions. We will continue to monitor the situation but plan no changes to the programming or paywall structure in advance of our global launch on March 28th.”

Well, of course I clicked on the FreeNYTimes feed to see how many people are following it. (Yes, I have a bit of interest in Twitter followship.) And I have to say, I was quite surprised by the number I saw.

Care to take a guess? Go ahead, guess; don’t look at the sentence below.

Okay. As I type these words, at around 6 p.m. EDT on Tuesday, the FreeNYTimes feed has a whopping 152 followers. Am guessing this doesn’t say anything too meaningful about demand for free NYTimes.com content, but still, I’m surprised.

COMMENTS: 25

It doesn’t say anything meaningful about the demand for free access to the NY Times. Few people want EVERY SINGLE ARTICLE from the Times to clog their Twitter feed via this account. Many, many more will simply search for the account @FreeNYTimes when they find a specific article they’d like to read in its entirety, thus sidestepping the need to follow the account.